November 2007 Archives

As the planning gets into top gear for 2008, I'm pleased to be spending some more time working with Acrobat Connect Professional. I've normally been using it for live meetings where we can pull together people from around the globe into my virtual room and share resources, whiteboard, see each other and collaborate, no matter what hardware/software platforms everyone has.

However, the live meeting is probably not Acrobat Connect's most powerful use. It's a massively powerful tool for the delivery of e-learning, like the presentation voiceovers I've been delivering for the Adobe Academy recently (see old blog entries)

I noticed today that Royal Phillips have just adopted Acorbat Connect for the same reason....

Royal Philips Electronics has deployed Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional software to provide 135,000 registered users of its Healthcare Learning Management System with synchronous training, video conferencing and Web seminar clinical and technical programs.

The company has seen Acrobat Connect Professional enhance the training experience, while at the same time complement the onsite training held at customer locations in more than 100 countries and Philips Global Training Centers in Europe, Asia and North America.

Royal Philips Electronics develops over 100 training modules annually, many of which employ synchronous elements. The ability to archive seminars will make these synchronous elements available to people unable to attend the live sessions and provide supplemental refresher training as well.

"The use of Acrobat Connect Professional supports our goal of simplifying healthcare for our customers and partners, as well as enhancing training opportunities for global marketing, sales and distribution teams," said Douglas Dell, Global Director of Learning Services for Philips Medical Systems, a division of Royal Philips Electronics.

"It also supports our overall strategy of enhancing the customer experience through the lifespan of system ownership. With Acrobat Connect Professional, our Learning Services business can offer quality, interactive e-learning programs to the users of our advanced medical equipment and help ensure better patient care management," added Dell.

Royal Philips Electronics seamlessly integrated Acrobat Connect Professional software into its in-house SCORM-compliant Learning Management System. Incorporating synchronous elements into its specialized healthcare education programs enables the organization to more securely deliver training programs globally without limitations of connecting through firewalls or requiring software downloads, which represent an obstacle for many healthcare institutions. The Adobe Flash Player software makes it easy for users, content authors and technical staff to use.

I know a little of what Thanksgiving's all about, but being back in Blighty, the only thing I notice is a distict lack of emails from my colleagues in the US. I hope you've all had a good time over the last few days. I believe also that last friday signalled the start of the Christmas shopping season.

I'll be over in San Jose shortly for our kick-off event, but forst we have to finish off the financial year. I'm talking with customers in every vertical market sctor you could think of, Financial, Government, Manufacturing, Marketing, everyone really. Most unusually, I was trying to get 3D models from the Lego modeller application captured into Acrobat 3D. I almost succeeded too.

On the product side, there's also a great link from the Acrobat user community, our friend/guru Ted Padova has taken to the next level his generosity for freely sharing with the user community his wealth of product expertise. In addition to routinely dispensing nuggets of PDF-oriented knowledge via his blog, he's now put together a compilation of "101 of my favorite tips and frequently used tasks in Acrobat, JavaScript and LiveCycle Designer" in eBook format, and is offering it as a free download.

Well, that's what we are, Englands first 11 are up to the job, but with 8 men unavailable, it showed just how poor our replacement players are.... Oh yes, and the manager's useless..... excuse me while I go lie down somewhere.

Again, I feel compelled to start this blog entry with an apology, a week has gone by without a sniff of an entry and I feel I must respond to the literally zero emails that have come my way asking for more info from me....... (tumbleweed)

So, well, it's still end of year type busy, so my time is spent with lots and lots of how to's and quick questions from our sales team and partners/resellers.

I've added my profile to the Acrobat User Community, if you're a user of Adobe Acrobat, I highly reccomend joining this site. It's a great place to gather information on Acrobat and get best advice, not only from Adobe chaps and women, but from real, honest-to-goodness people using the product.

Well, this is the second time today I've typed this blog entry, don't you just love it when your browser software does the unexpected and just switches itself off? I know I do, it cetrainly doesn't frustrate and annoy to the point where you want to turn your laptop into a frisbee and send it clear across the office..... nope, not at all, it's a breeze really.

I was prompted to pop an entry in because I had noticed that it had been a whole week since I'd posted and I always said I'd not do the standard blogging thing of posting heavily for a few weeks then getting distracted by a passing buterfly and fogetting where I lived.

November 30th is the end of our financial year at Adobe, so as you can imagine, November gets pretty busy and always manages to surprise. Yesterday for example, I was asked if Acrobat could add watermarks to existing documents and indeed it can, it's one of those features I don't demonstrate these days but is really usefull for lots of people.

Checkout the Document > Watermark menu options. You can add watermarks in differing fonts, from text files, with many display options including orientation and opacity. You can decide if the watermark is shown on-screen and/or in print etc. Well worth exploring if you distribute information of differing security or sensitivity levels regularly.

In case I didn't mention it before, we also had a great event last week, the Adobe Business Exchange, held in Gloucester st. London. The event was primarily aimed at people using Adobe's LiveCycle range of business transformation products, but as always, most people there used Acrobat too, so I was kept very busy answering questions and explaining the relationship between Acrobat, Connect and LiveCycle.

Wow, I was a little surprised about the response from my last post. I had no idea people actually read this Blog... Way to go readers, give yourselves a pat on the back from me!

So, just a quickkie today about using the split screen facility. By using the screen-splitting commands in Acrobat you can view large documents, including drawings and spreadsheets, more easily on screen than you can on paper.

The commands in the Window menu (shown below) give you the ability to view a PDF with the document pane divided into two (Split command) or four panes (Spreadsheet Split command).

Split Commands
In Split view, each window operates independently. In Spreadsheet Split, the windows are coordinated so you can keep column or row headings visible while you scroll through a large table or spreadsheet.

With Split view, you can view a single document in two windows. You can scroll, change the magnification level, or turn to a different page in the active window without affecting the other, as shown below.

Split View

In Split view, click a pane to make it active. You can navigate to a new page or to a new zoom setting and the other window will remain in place. Drag the gray splitter bar to resize the windows.

So this makes it easy now to view two seperate sections of a document together on a single screen, maybe a network diagram and the detail page of the hardware components making up that network.... Back in the paper world, you would constantly be turning from one page to another to match part numbers and descriptions with the diagram. By using the Split command in Acrobat, you can view both pages in the same document pane.

Spreadsheet Split
The Spreadsheet Split view is useful if you want to keep column headings and row labels visible while scrolling through a large spreadsheet, chart or table. In this mode, changing the magnification in one pane changes the magnification in all panes.

Scrolling is coordinated between the panes: scrolling a pane horizontally also scrolls the pane above or below it; scrolling vertically also scrolls the pane to the left or right of that pane.